Ceri Radford reviews Michael Aspel's new series which looks back at a century
of social change in Britain.

A Hundred Years of Us was a gentle and enjoyable ramble through a century of history, using the census as a way of exploring how things have changed in Britain since the first detailed national poll in 1911. Michael Amstel was the perfect host for this sort of programme, engaging in civil, sedate banter with a mixture of well-known guests and ordinary people whose lives have been directly affected by the social changes of the past century.

In today’s first episode of the five-part series, Amstel met a pair of twin brothers, David and John Hill, who were divided as children after one passed and one-failed the eleven plus. When John – who failed the test – had to take an IQ test for medical reasons 25 years later, it revealed that his IQ was in fact the same as his brother’s. He had absolutely no bitterness or regrets, however. “It was a very good system,” he said, “I was good in metal work. I excelled at that.”

Ironically enough, it was David, the working class boy who went to grammar school to university to an academic career, who now rails against the system which served him so well. He railed against the 11 plus as a mechanism “to keep the social structure as it was.” Needless to say, these views weren’t interrogated with any rigour, but it was interesting nonetheless to see how differently two products of the same system saw it.

In the weakest section of the programme, former cricketer and current TV “everyman” Phil Tufnell went down a Welsh coal mine to try his hand at one of the most common jobs in 1911. This felt a little gimmicky: TV is already saturated with presenters trying their hands at the jobs of yore. Why not just tell us about the working conditions of coal miners a century ago – a genuinely fascinating topic – instead of sending a retired cricketer down a pit to grimace, say blimey a lot and ineptly wave a pickaxe around?

But the odd low point was more than compensated for by plenty of fascinating archive footage, including the sight of a baby elephant being led down the streets of Glasgow in the Sixties to publicise the opening of an Indian restaurant. There were just six Indian restaurants in Britain before the Second World War, by the end of the Sixties there were over a thousand, and by 2001, chicken tika masala – a dish invented in Glasgow – had become Britain’s most popular dish.